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A LETTER 

TO THE 

UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS 

MEMORIAL CORPORATION 



FROM 

KATE STEPHENS 




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A LETTER TO 

THE UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS 

MEMORIAL CORPORATION 



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A LETTER TO 

THE UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS 

MEMORIAL CORPORATION 

FROM 

KATE STEPHENS 



Ilk, 







TM« TUOOR PRESS, H. T. 






The number of this Copy ts L 



" 'O ye men, it is not the great king, nor the multi- 
tude of men . . . that excelleth. 

Who is it then that ruleth them, or hath the lordship 
over them? . . . 

Great is the truth, and stronger than all things. 

All the earth calleth upon the truth, and the heaven 
blesseth it. All works shake and tremble at it, and 
with it is no unrighteous thing. ... It endureth, and 
is always strong. It liveth and conquereth for ever- 
more. 

With her there is no accepting of persons or rewards; 
but she doeth the things that are just, and refraineth 
from all unjust and wicked things; and all men do well 
like of her work. . . . She is the strength, kingdom, 
power and majesty of all ages.' . . . 

And all the people shouted, and said, 'Great is 
Truth, and mighty above all things!"* 

— The Book of Esdras. 



6] 



The University of Kansas 
Memorial Corporation 

Gentlemen 

I have received, through representatives of 
your Corporation in their New York "drive," 
your request for my contribution to your 
"task to finance and complete two Memorial 
structures — the Stadium and the Kansas 
Union — and to place upon the campus the 
statue of the late Dean James Woods 
Green." 

In answer I have to say: 

The men and women who gave their lives 
in the great war no one honors more than I. 
No one would more gratefully go without to 
have the privilege of helping to commemorate 
the sacrifices of our University boys and girls. 

I cannot, however, give money, a certain 
ratio of which is to go to what is called "the 
Green memorial." After days of deliberation 
upon what your representatives lay before 
me, I finally recall to your m.inds the brazen 
lie as to founder set up (1910) in the building 
of the Law School of the University of Kan- 
sas, and tell you I can no more give to "the 
[7] 



A LETTER 

Green memoriar* than I can give to a me- 
morial to some acknowledged betrayer or 
filcher of a benefactor's good name. In not 
giving for the purpose you ask, I serve highest 
ethics — fidelity to truth and justice. 

If you at all know my stand towards, and 
affection for, our Alma Mater, you, and the 
Alumni Association, know I am not a "tight 
wad" — that years ago, in "The Graduate 
Magazine," I urged plain and simple living in 
order to give to the University's needs; that I 
bought three Ufe-memberships in the Asso- 
ciation; and in other small ways I have 
expressed my inclinations — a little trading 
gift as to my book, "Life at Laurel Town: In 
Anglo-Saxon Kansas," has already, agreeably 
to our terms, netted the Alumni Association 
a substantial sum. In fact, for the Alumni 
Association I have had a sort of mother- 
fondness. I was the Association's first 
president (in the last year I held the Greek 
professorship); and later, here in New York, 
I called together (12 March, 1905) gradu- 
ates and former students to form and officer 
the New York union. (My rule not to speak 
of what I do, or have done, I, with regret, 

[8] 



A LETTER 

have here to set aside to clear my position.) 
To the University itself, I have given gifts 
ranging from mummy-cloth from the tomb of 
the Pharaoh of the Mosaic Jews to late novels 
by our graduates; and, as you know, have 
written of the University in newspapers and 
books; and in songs reflecting the University's 
local color and original refinement.* 

You are, you tell me, endeavoring to raise 
money for the memorial reason and sentiment 
would erect to more than three thousand 
boys and girls of our University who put 
their words into deeds, and went to the late 
war, and gave themselves, and all they were, 
and all they longed to be and do in, and for, 
the world — one hundred and twenty-eight of 
whom gave their lives. 

And you yoke as pendant to the memorials 
you deem fitting, and plan, for commemora- 
tion of those brave young people, a memorial 
to a man who identified himself in no way 



*"The University's original refinement!" you may 
exclaim. Yes. For instance; it is not possible that the 
founders and early developers of the University would 
have believed the cacophony of "jazz" to be music, or 
"The Saturday Evening Post" literature. 

[9] 



A LETTER 

with sacrificial service for the country in his 
youth — during the war of 1861-65. 

Your medley confuses calm, independent 
minds. The question rises, "Exactly what 
sort of a Ufe are you, in the memorials you 
name, aiming to set up as embodiment of 
ideals worthy of laudation and emulation ? — 
the life that splendidly loses self to better 
others? — or the life that seeks its extension 
by ignoble emphasis of self?" In the eighteen- 
sixties, I repeatj although in the pink of 
health and early manhood, Mr. Green could 
not be counted in the Service, but among 
those then known as **stay-at-home-rangers" 
— a terser, more vigorous descriptive for the 
same sort of young man prevailed during the 
late war. 

This early attitude of dependence on 
others for carrying the responsibihties, and 
performing the duties, of Ufe, crystalized into 
an unbroken habit. During his last forty 
and more years Mr. Green lived mainly ori 
others' energy and constructive ability — each 
in-law contributing some quota to his fur- 
thering. His University post he had through 
my Father, Judge Stephens, energizing and 
[10] 



A LETTER 

pushing to its foundation the Law SchooL 
Married to my sister, Mr. Green came to live 
in a house built by his wife, with her money, 
and successfully carried on by her inborn 
gift of hospitality and executive energy.* 
Thus the necessities, and, as happened in 
this case, luxuries, of roof and livelihood. 
He was buried in the Stephens lot at the 
cemetery, from the church of the Stephens 
family — he was born and bred in the Presby- 
terian communion, the branch commonly 
called "U. P." His name now stands on the 
Stephens monument. His will devised Steph- 
ens property. There were no children; before 
his marriage Mr. Green said he did not 
believe in having children; "They are more 
trouble than pleasure." 

The character "the Green memoriar' aims 
to hold up as a model I do not admire — and 
I have more knowledge of its elements and 
their synthetic workings than anybody now 
alive. A bidder for the applause of surface 
sentimentalism, a sedulous preserver of ap- 
plause won, an actor even to rapid changing 

*"All he was she made him," friends of his in 
Lawrence have told me. 

[II] 



A LETTER 

of facial expression — as from threatening 
looks for one he was endeavoring to intimi- 
date to the "Uncle Jimmy" beam worn on 
the campus — Mr. Green loved to attitudinize, 
to pose. An insistent egotism — boundless 
love of self — bore through his ends; by whim- 
perings, by if-you-don't-I-will-never-speak-to 
)^ou-agains and other bullyings, by under- 
hand up-setting of others' constructive work, 
by grabbings from dead and living Stephen- 
ses. (Once a jackdaw, says a fable, would be 
king, so he stole from better-endowed birds.) 
If your wisdom tells you that envy is a motor 
force in an inert, non-initiative, non-con- 
structive nature, you see an impeller of his 
more plainly.* 

The foregoing is bare outline, and through 
it I submit, bringing few of many testi- 
monies I might adduce, that the Stephens 



*A woman of Lawrence, hearing he was to marry 
my sister, and seeing him for the first time, turned to 
me and said, "Do you know what that nose is for?" 

"No," I answered, laughing in youthful ignorance of 
her shrewd reading of character. 

"You'll find out what that nose is for," she returned, 
solemnly shaking her head at me. 

Il2l 



A LETTER 

family have already contributed liberally and 
should be excused from further service to 
your pendent* hero. The bearing and exter- 
ior of the gentleman — there was always about 
him an enveloping refinement of the earl}*- 
American, Scotch-Covenanter stock — com- 
plaisant when things were coming his way, 
an omnivorous appetite for flattery, para- 
sitic in thought and act, what little thinking 
he did as to the objective world reactionary 
(perhaps because of mental sluggishness he 
loathed probing to the root of a matter) — 

*"Pendent" for this reason: At the beginning of the 
subscriptions for the milHon dollar fund, all newspaper 
reports I saw said the University Memorial people 
worked for two ends, a Stadium and a Kansas-Union 
building. When in Kansas I asked why they had taken 
on a third. A graduate, hand and glove with affairs, 
told me the third came from a "deal" with the "James 
Woods Green Memorial Association," namely: If the 
said Green association would help "pep up" the Uni- 
versity Memorial people's "drive," in Kansas City, for 
one hundred and sixty thousand dollars, the said Uni- 
versity Memorial people would, in recognition of the 
said Green association's help, take over and relieve said 
Green association from responsibility for payment of 

forty thousand dollars the Green association had 

pledged for the "Uncle Jimmy" statue. 

[13I 



A LETTER 

through many years I never knew him to 
utter one original thought, or to do one 
original deed. *Tt is an immense advan- 
tage," declared a witty Frenchman, "never 
to have said anything." 

His parasitism sought chiefly the weaker — 
the dead and women. Upon the efforts and 
abnegation of two women his career was main- 
ly based — his able, widowed mother, who car- 
ried him through PhilUps (Andover) Academy 
(1859-62), and Williams College (1862-66); 
and later my sister, her devotion and energy.* 

Perhaps it was consciousness of his indebt- 
ness to women in ancillary capacity that 
made him, through many years, ridicule and 
rail at bettering the legal condition of women .j^ 

*Verses lately of vogue in newspapers express, in 
popular phrase, psychical interactions such as these — 
lines running somewhat like this: 

"There are two sorts of people, 

Just two sorts, I ween: 

The people who lift, 

And the people who lean." 

tHis eighteenth-century notions would arraign those 
of today, when some sudden gust over-rode his settled 
contempt for the subject, and he would refer to my work 

[14] 



A LETTER 

To say that he was "a man's man," "with 
a passion for men," (whatever abnormality 
that may mean) dodges the truth by phrase- 
mongering. No one with any real knowledge 
of Mr. Green's tastes and habits could in 



for improving women's economic and political status 
as "your straddle-bug ideas." 

"The best women in town do not want to vote," he 
began one day. "Who are the best women in town?" I 
queried in answer, "Who is wise enough to tell who the 
best women are?" A silence, threatening, though, and 
oppressive, was the sole reply my questions had. 

At the request of my sister, Mrs. Green, I lived in 
her house during the summer of 1908, and in the com- 
plete financial and other independence she and I agreed 
to when she made the proposition that I should. Mr. 
Green acquiesced. Seemingly, later on, he develojjed 
some regret for his agreeing, for the next year (Novem- 
ber, 1909) he sent me a letter saying I had "disgraced 
our house" by carrying on propaganda for a women 
regent in Kansas while staying there the year before. 

Such puny-spiritednesses — and those more far- 
reaching — through years! Their aggregation tells most 
plainly the calibre of the man you are heroizing. Hard 
to bear? Yes. Just as, in the world not of the spirit 
but of matter, one flea-bite may not nettle you; nor 
two; nor three; but an aggregation of flea-bites goads 
you desperately. 

hsl 



A LETTER 

conscience make that assertion. If you in- 
sist on bringing forward the question of sex, 
it would be exacter to say that a man's 
egotistical posings appeal especially to women 
and Mr. Green should thus be marked "a 
woman's man." Here we let in the smoke- 
screens rhetorically evolved, and just now 
quoted (in the first sentence of this para- 
graph) simply adding: The truth is that 
phases Mr. Green assumed appealed to types, 
not necessarily hysterical but rather leaning, 
on the one side to the primitive, on the other 
to the neurotic, in both sexes. 

The nam.e "Uncle Jimmy," an intimate of 
his told me, first fell from the lips of a grate- 
ful boy when Mr. Green, missing a part of a 
class, went to a police-court judge and asked 
him to free some student, or students, from 
the "cooler." Those who knew him fami- 
liarly during the next twenty-five, or so, 
years, know that his avocative interests lay 
in vamping the tradition the name- bore, and 
touching up the halo popularly supposed to 
go with the sentiment of relationship ex- 
pressed by strangers. 

"Best man I ever knew," cried a man 

[i6] 



A LETTER 

from Kansas City, when, here in New York, 
he learned Mr. Green was my brother-in-law. 

"How did you know him?" I asked. 

"Oh, I used to see him going over the 
campus," he answered, his eyes taking on 
the ghnt of retrospection, "and one day I 
spoke to him — ^just said, 'Good morning, 
Uncle Jimmy,' you know; and he said some- 
thing back." A pause, and then, "Best man 
I ever knew." 

All well enough, if you are after primitive 
brain-labor — which, I agree, has a beauty of 
its own, and a use. But flash sentimentaHsm 
is not the spiritual granite from which human- 
ity builds institutions expressing the strength, 
nobility, endurance and symmetry of its soul. 

"Did you," I once asked Mr. Green, 
thinking of the years he had, in and out of 
University buildings, talked "athletics," es- 
pecially football. "Did you ever play a real 
game of ball in your life?" For a time he 
sat silent* — puffing at a cigar — it was on the 



*You remember him always seated — muscles relaxed 
and his body a bit settled. He was erect only in the 
walking which he undertook late in life at the doctor's 
orders. 

I17] 



A LETTER 

porch of the Tennessee Street house — and 
then said he didn't beheve he ever did. 
Almost any egocentric, in war time or in 
peace, is wilHng to let the other fellow get 
down into the arena and do the work, pro- 
vided he sits by and, by deft manipulation, 
sweeps in the applause fans over on the 
bleachers bestow. 

Mr. Green "loved" the student who would 
"root" for him and help make him "It." 
The man or woman, boy or girl, he could not 
count upon as his "rooter," he did not "love." 

An example: — I take a boy to the Univer- 
sity (1908) for entrance into the college — 
the only boy ever on the hill to whom the 
man nursing the "Uncle Jimmy" legend is 
legally, by his marriage, "uncle." 

Mr. Green opposes the boy's even entering 
the University, tells me there are enough of 
the Stephens family there already; says I 
"have brought the boy here fixed out like a 
Gould"; and carps because the boy is not of 
football timber — a doctor in New York hav- 
ing forbidden him "athletics." 

The boy persists and enters the college. 
Throughout the four years of his course the 
[18] 



A LETTER 

dean of the School of Law covertly opposes 
him, and when the boy's enrollment among 
the "laws" is broached, the dean testily an- 
swers, "He can come in. But I'll treat him 
just like any other nigger." 

The boy, grandson of the man whose abili- 
ties pushed the School of Law to foundation 
and thus furnished "Uncle Jimmy" with his 
life-job — -the boy ("Uncle Jimmy's" wife's 
nephew; of Anglo-Celtic blood) does not 
enter the Law School. 

If you had borne such burdens through 
heavy years, would you give your money 
to perpetuate characterizations of the dean 
as "A man's man"; "A man with a passion 
for men"; "The embodiment of the Univer- 
sity's spirit"; "The soul of the University,?" 

I hardly think you would. If you are a 
real man, or a real woman, with red blood 
and a beating heart, and detestation of the 
erection of aristocratic privilege in the insti- 
tution of a democracy, you would tell the 
truth when asked to support monstrous fal- 
sities — I believe you honest enough to do 
that. 

All in all, year in and year out, Mr. Green 
[19] 



A LETTER 

was the best actor I ever saw off the stage. 
A habit he had of bearing himself as if he 
were aggrieved, if all before him was not 
bending his way, thus making appeal to 
others' sympathies — what I have spoken of 
as "whimperings"; what boys call "putting 
up your lip" — must have taken tremendous 
hold upon young men with the impression- 
able hearts, in the experienced years and cir- 
cumstances, of law students. 

Thus it happened that so long as certain 
former students, possibly pleasuring in "legal 
fictions," gathered round a table in, for 
example, Kansas City, and seemingly de- 
lighted in telling one another, and the local 
press, fanciful stories about an imaginary 
character, which they expressed admiration 
for and called "Uncle Jimmy" — through the 
years this went on I spoke out but once — 
no, twice.* When I saw, or heard of, re- 



*In The "Graduate Magazine" of November, 1910; 
and then only after the publication of a most flagrant 
falsehood, which Mr. Green aided and abetted. With 
utmost consideration for the mistaken young men, and 
delicacy in phrasing their mistake, I told undeniable 
truth — showing how their bronze tablet published un- 
[20I 



A LETTER 

ports of such proceedings, naturally I thought 
of apocryphal histories; hke Baron Munchau- 
sen's, for instance. Then again I wondered 
at the ethical steriHty of the entertainers' 
place and times. Their conditions and pick 
called to my mind Byron's opening lines to 
his tales of "Don Juan"; 

*T want a hero; an uncommon want." 



truth. What resulted? Little in public, so far as I 
know; much in private. 

From what would you say inaction sprang? From 
moral cowardice, fear to take down the lying tablet? 
and by so doing confess their mistake ? Or did inaction 
spring from stiff-necked sneers at my inability to do 
more than protest? 

The old Socratic precept, taught years ago at the 
University, that the educated man is zealous for 
truth, that he will hasten to correct, when once you 
have pointed out, injustice — this teaching of our Uni- 
versity fell through. 

So it happened that in a University embodying the 
loftiest spirit of a democracy in its search for truth; 
and in a School of Law supposedly the completest ex- 
pression of its democracy's eagerness for justice — in a 
School of Law where at least some of the men were pre- 
sumably sensitive to truth and eager for justice — a 
wrong such as I tell of stood, and doubtless today 
stands, unrighted. 

[21] 



A LETTER 

But now that those men's — "ni/ boys'" — 
fictions! have, denying all intellectual hon- 
esty, set up as serious statements of fact, 
have sought to take on the garb of truth. 



My second speaking out is in my book, "Life at 
Laurel Town," page 178: 

"WITNESS UNTO THE TRUTH" 
"Thou shak not be?r false witness," spoke the God 
Of Israel on Horeb's barren height. 
"Unto the truth hear v/itness," speaks the Voice 
Of every folk who strengthens in the Right: — 
To men of Athens in vast jury courts 
Judging their brother Greek by law and fact; 
To Romans in their order and reports 
Of the Twelve Tables and juridic act; 
To Paul, the evangel, who flamed his faith 
For Jew and Gentile round the Midland shore: 
To Mahomet, the Arab, him who saith 
"Thy justice knoweth God for evermore." 

"Unto the truth bear witness," urge with awe 
All codes and ethics of our School of Law. 

tThe following is the exactly told history of one 
"Uncle Jimmy" fiction, which might have grown to 
luxuriant proportions but for a little timely common 
sense and common honesty. It illustrates how natures 
easily, loosely, tautologically emotional, hankering 
after some peg on which to hang their fancies, distort 

U2] 



A LETTER 

and go so far as to intrude upon me and 
ask my aid for their perpetuation in a statue 
and inscriptions wrought by a sculptor re- 
puted in portraiture — loyalty, and justice, 
and honor force me to these few plain truths. 
I am not one of "my boys." Neither am I 
a moral coward, acquiescing in falsities 



plainest happenings. In the face of staring facts dis- 
proving their fable-building, they seem merely to need 
a name familiar to their ears, the suggestion of a con- 
crete figure, and lo! before your very eyes they senti- 
mentalize and stereotype their myths: 

Late one day in the spring of 1919, the postman 
brought me a box meticulously bound and directed. As 
I took it from his hand I saw, in shy letters off in one 
corner of the wrapper, the address of . 

"Not hard to tell what is in this parcel," I said to 
myself. 

Redbuds! There they lay, shining up from layers 
of damp cotton that a poet's sensibility had prepared 
for their journey. 

The tin box had held back the vapor which heat of 
the mail-bags formed, and moisture had forced the 
twigs into putting forth leaves of palest, most delicate 
green. 

The buds were a vision. New York faded from my 
view. Instead of its brick and stone, before my eyes 
stood the splendors of spring in Kansas — those days 

[23] 



A LETTER 

through fear of the disfavor of those I know 
in Kansas. Like every real American I am 
a citizen abhorring the methods and results 
of "secret diplomacy," working for truth and 
justice and to be delivered from shams. 



when you look towards woods and see a burning torch 
edging the grey of the still unleafed forest. 

As daylight faded, I set the box on a stone window- 
ledge, hoping that Croton water, saturating the cotton, 
and the cool air of an April night, would quite refresh 
the buds. 

Next morning, at the Rooms of the Kansas Welcome 
Association, I found a blue bowl and arranged the 
flowers in it, weaving through smaller twigs a vellum 
slip bearing mearly ten typewritten words: SENT BY 
FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS. 

The bowl I set on a table by a north window, so the 
buds might gain whatever cool air came in. 

"How those redbuds will speak to doughboys and 
sailors just landed from France!" I said to myself. 
"When the buddies catch sight of the blossoms, they 
will think for a second they are actually back on some 
Kansas farm!" 

The Association had advertised a reception for that 
evening, and boys would be coming from the camps 
neighboring New York; also from hospitals. 

Several days went over before I was again at the 
Rooms. 

[24] 



A LETTER 

Among you, a people thinking in this 
matter in what is roughly called "herd 
thinking" — no one knowing any exact founda- 
tion for absurd assertions, except that "every- 
body says so," "everyone else does" — simple 



As I entered, and started towards the window to see 
how the flowers had stood the fever and fret of a great 
city — as I crossed the floor, a woman, only a few weeks 
from Kansas, came forward, and cried; 

"See what 'Uncle Jimmy' sent!" 

"What did he send?" I asked, peering in the direc- 
tion her hand pointed. 

"Those redbuds in the bowl," answered the lady. 

1 he vellum slip witnessing that had sent the 

buds still lay woven among the twigs. 

"But this piece of paper," I said, placing a finger on 

the ten typewritten words, "tells that sent the 

flowers from the University of Kansas. I brought them 
here for the buddies to enjoy. The boys tell me that 
battle-scenes haunt them. I thought the redbuds, 
bringing vividly before their eyes Kansas woods and 
fields, might help to banish war-horrors. 

"Mr. Green knows nothing of their being here," I 
added. 

"Oh!" answered the lady coldly, turning away. 

Thus passed one would-be myth. 

Loose and emotional thought! Then loose and emo- 
tional speaking and action! So is truth crucified. 

l2Sl 



A LETTER 

statements like this of mine may suffer 
attack. Stone-throwing at tellers of truth 
about idols (whether of clay or bronze) has 
not been uncommon through history. You, 
and others unwilling, possibly unable, to 
distinguish between commonplace detraction 
and ardor for right, and not knowing it is 
my habit to speak guardedly* and to under- 
state — you and others may belittle my mo- 
tives, and fall back on saying, "Pretty poor 
taste"; "She might have kept quiet"; "All 
this is the natural consequence of teaching 
girls to read," etc., and may quote the old 
Latin saying, De mortuis nil nisi bonum. 
Such possibiUties I foresee. Among an emo- 
tional people the declaration of a German 
poet is especially apt to prove true: 

"Wer die Wahrheit denkt, 
Muss sein Pferd am Ziigel haben; 
Wer die Wahrheit schreibt, 
Muss sein Fuss im Biigel haben; 



*With reverence for the careful measure of our 
mother-tongue, this writing sustains by evidence its 
use of its every noun, adjective, adverb, verb and 
descriptive phrase. 

[26] 



A LETTER 

Wer sie aber spricht, 

Muss statt Fusse Fliigel haben."* 

Still, knowing all this may come, love of 
justice and horror of lies force me to what I 
here write. It is not a pleasant task to put 
such memories in type. It brings before me 
afresh the price I, and others, paid in learn- 
ing what I tell. It is a duty. To clear my 
position, I have had to refer to realities seem- 
ingly unknown to those who hitched to a 
work planned to commemorate the bravery 
of thousands now alive (some perhaps with 
the pitiful lives of the gassed and shell- 
shocked), and of one hundred and twenty- 
eight boys and girls who lived bravely and 
died bravely, a memorial to a man through- 
out his long, easy, women-protected life to- 
tally and constitutionally unheroic. 

Of posthumous honors "my boys" were 



*"Who thinks the truth, 
Must hold the bridle in his hand; 
Who writes the truth, 
Must ready in the stirrup stand; 
Who speaks the truth, 
Must have on wings to flee the land." 
[27] 



A LETTER 

going to pay him Mr. Green repeatedly, and 
apparently with a sense of satisfaction, told 
me. But he could not have foreseen that in 
death, as in life, by a fatality essentially 
expressing his character, he was to "get 
there" by hanging to the strong and brave — 
those with the instinct of initiation, con- 
structive activity and abounding energy; 
those too earnest, too engaged in the serious- 
ness of living to attitudinize, and dramatize 
themselves and their deeds. 

A hungerer after the plaudits of the crowd, 
no matter if plaudits won at the expense of 
honesty and loyalty! And this the result!* 



*A newspaper picture of "the Green memorial'* 
friends in Massachusetts send me while the printer is 
taking up this Letter. 

Perhaps the statue of Mr, Green is not meant to be 
a portrait. Two other statues from the same sculptor's 
hand are familiar to me through my passing them 
hundreds of times: "John Harvard" (which I best 
remember the morning it shone with a pair of painted 
red stockings put on over night by lawless students), 
and the "Alma Mater" (commonly known as "Miss 
Goldstein") in front of the Library of Columbia Uni- 
versity. Perhaps, like these two, "the Green memo- 
rial" is not meant to carry a portrait. 
I 28] 



A LETTER 

Poor Jimmy! 

Just now I named duty. My conscience, 
since your request makes my canvassing the 
question necessary — my conscience would 
accuse me of unfaith to a devoted soul now 
with God, an untiring worker for the right, 
a profound, penetrative thinker, one of the 
best of fathers, if I did not refuse your re- 
quest, and tell you why I refuse. If I were 
silently to send you a contribution, and so 
endorse the character and deeds you ascribe 
to Mr. Green — character and deeds doubt- 
less believed in by some of those erecting 



Unless the camera distorts, the figure representing 
Mr. Green is not fair; nor the parts taken by themselves. 
For Mr. Green's the trunk lacks length, thickness, 
rotundity. Mr. Green never stood with legs in the 
relation of the statue's — the picture's — legs. His 
standing attitude was that of the cultivated man. His 
feet were arched, for a man of his size the best-shaped 
I ever saw (so small that when he stood, and even when 
he walked, he seemed a bit top-heavy) and always 
finely shod. Even the head, in general expression, is 
not Mr. Green's. I catch lines like his, but his chin he 
never thrust out at the angle of the statue's — ^the 
picture's. 

I do not hold any brief for Mr. Green. God forbid! 

[29] 



A LETTER 

memorials to him — I should be disloyal to 
my Father, his work and ideals, and disloyal 
to members of my family at one time de- 
pendent on me, and by my contribution 
acknowledge as truths outstanding falsehoods. 
More than fifty years now, I have watched 
human Hfe passing before my eyes. In what 
I have seen, and what I have learned of men 
and women, I agree with Balzac — there are 
more saints than niches. But my tests as to 
ethics, and other fundamentals that go to 
make the character of a saint, seem to vary 
widely from yours and certain of your asso- 
ciates'. The life you choose over and above 



But I do not like to see injustice done anyone — even a 
doer of injustice. Mr. Green had a more dignified, 
more refined presence than the statue — the picture — 
expresses — a mellowness which would naturally de- 
velop with the life he, fortunately for himself, fell into; 
a mellowness almost unctuous, like the old-time 
ecclesiast's, or the successful politician's, yet with less 
gush and more dignity than the politician's. 

If Mr. Green were to see the statue of himself — as 
the picture represents it — I wonder what he would say! 
After all those years of propagation of the "Uncle 
Jimmy" legend, would he think of the man who prayed 
to be delivered from his friends? 
l3o] 



A LETTER 

nobly self-sacrificing, altruistic lives lived in 
Kansas, and name singly, and celebrate by 
publishing broadcast, I can not accept for 
distinction. 

In every service to truth and honor in, 
and for the University of Kansas and its 
people, I am. 

Faithfully yours 

Kate Stephens 

New York 

7 January 1922 



31] 



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